Chapter 17

By now, everyone who had half a brain had figured out what was really happening at the Seward Park Omnium. The event had changed rather rapidly from a local team race event with a level playing field to a grudge match between two teams, one of which was full of ringers! All the Cat 1 racers had figured it out pretty quickly and were even now placing over/under bets on the survival of numbnuts and his team. Hell, even his own teammates had pretty much done everything they could to distance themselves, short of kicking him out of their staging area. Poor ol’ John sat all by himself in a corner of their staging area with a very dark cloud hanging over his head. For the barest of moments, I thought about feeling sorry for him, but it passed rather quickly!

For the TTT, we had set up in basic red and black skin suits, which had no markings of any sort. For the road race and the criterium we would be wearing our ‘team’ kits, which consisted of the pale red jerseys that had been ridden in the STP, with one very subtle variation: the playing cards displayed on the front and back. For the STP, the ‘Road Queens’ had worn the four queens with the Queen of Hearts on top. I had worn the four Aces, with the Joker on top. I was still wearing my jersey, but the other three guys were wearing jerseys with the four Kings on them. The subtle part was that the top card the other guys were wearing was the King of Hearts, also known as the ‘Suicide King’. This time it had a double meaning: First, the ladies had decided that should our team prevail they were going to show their appreciation to the other team members, and had made it pretty clear what that reward might entail! Talk about a highly motivated team! Second, it was a not too subtle dig at good ol’ numbnuts and the cardinal sin of abandoning a teammate, and worse yet, a lady, on the side of the road.

The announcer had called all the other categories to their respective starts, and the other races had gone pretty much to form, with the usual tactics and the splintered fields that usually resulted from having more than one class race against another. At most local races there was a women’s open field race, where all the women regardless of class raced in one open field, usually because there were not enough women to break the field apart by category. Then usually the lower categories of men raced, with all the fives, fours and sometimes threes as a group. Finally, there would be the twos and ones race. For Seward Park, there were enough entries in the twos to divide them out, so the Category one race would be only the ones! You could feel the anticipation build as the final race of the day were called to the start line.

We took our time and rolled up to the start area after almost all the other teams had already arrived. For some reason, there was a big opening between numbnuts and the rest of the field, and as we rolled up it was somewhat like a scene from the “Ten Commandments”: The Reed Sea parted, and there was just enough space for us to slot in right alongside the other team. If I didn’t know better, I’d have thought it was a set-up ... The starter gave his last-minute instructions to the field, and then we were off. The road race for the Cat 1’s was five laps of the route we had used for the TTT, for a total of roughly one hundred miles.

Everyone seemed to be a bit on edge, and the pack held together pretty much intact for the first three laps. Sure, there was a little jostling and jockeying for position, but everyone seemed to be waiting for the other shoe to drop. For our part, we rode in a two-by-two file and simply marked John and his team. Any time they moved, we moved too. By the mid-point of lap four, I think the pressure finally got the better of John’s tiny little forebrain. I could see he was stewing the whole way, and I figured one of two things would happen: he would crack under the pressure, fold up and fall back, or he would boil over and do something stupid. Personally, based on experience, I was betting on option two. Boy, how I liked to be right!